An Arrow in Time
by Reuben-on-wry
Summary: After the assassination of President Coin, the citizens of Panem are left leaderless and completely downtrodden. Katniss discovers a way to bring light and hope to millions of people, but the path is a dangerous one that she must travel alone, and to a place no human eye has seen for hundreds of years. (Note: Story on hold until fixes some annoying tech problems. )
1. Chapter 1 - Holding Breath

**Chapter 1 - Holding Breath**

Onlookers filled every square inch around the courthouse. The trial had lasted for two days, during which time most of them had remained where they were, all day and all night. They stood as far as the eye could see, shabby coats and shirts over thin, chilly frames. Their only thought was inside those walls. Even food was forgotten. Their only thoughts were with their savior, in flesh, who was being tried for the unthinkable crime of assassination. Why on earth had she done that? Was there a good reason? Was she really crazy, or trying to steal the presidential office for herself? Couldn't be, they told themselves. Unless…

Suddenly, rumors began to circulate that a verdict has been handed down. What was it? What happened? And then, the sound of bees. It grew louder, and turned to a rumbling, like a bitter and spiteful wind. From the south over the rooftops came a silver hovercraft, red burners below casting off orange sparks as they pushed away the ground. The craft banked sharply and began diving towards the courthouse, towards the twenty foot door that held all of their fates inside.

The crowd scattered as the craft dived, people trampling over anyone slower or shorter. It landed roughly on the sidewalk right in front of the door, just as it burst open. A thin woman with long, brown braids was pushed towards the ship by two men. One was short and thick, like a barrel with arms. The other had short cropped dark hair, severe eyes, and thick frames. They dashed into the hovercraft. As thousands of fervent devotees looked on in wonder, the ship bounded into the air, turned its rear towards the courthouse and soared out of sight. Their eyes trained on the ship as it headed towards the largest single building in all of Pan Em - the presidential palace.


	2. Chapter 2 - Unveiling

**Chapter 2 - Unveiling**

The steel cabin smelled like gasoline, cold and a dirty metal. In a corner near a pile of rifles, Katniss knelt, held her stomach, and vomited. She was free. "Temporary insanity" was the judgement the judge gave. He sounded equal parts sad and disappointed.

Immediately after the ruling, she opened her mouth but she was pulled off her feet before she could say a word. Two strong hands began maneuvering her towards the exit even before the judge had a chance to stand. The witnesses and jurors surged towards her, but Peeta knocked them away with a trunk-like arm.

Peeta pulled her through the masses. On her other hand was a tall, black man who shouldn't have been there. "Beetee?" she said? He smiled, though you could tell he was intently focused on moving her out of there.

"Hold on," Beetee said. "We've got to get to our ride."

And then they were in the sky. And she wasn't going to die anymore. She wa sure, so very sure it was all over at last. So much had happened. Prim. Cinna. Rue. So many people who died, many by her. She was ready for death. She felt like she deserved it. But apparently that wasn't to be.

Her stomach felt like it was full of soap and toilet water. She pulled her eyes shut and released everything that was inside. Then she made her way back to a seat. Outside the craft, white rooftops blurred past. The dirt streets were mostly empty. She could see someone had spraypainted the Mockingjay in black at a cross-streets. She looked up, and saw blue sky and clouds. White clouds that carried on as if nothing had happened.

Peeta talked to the pilot, who seemed nice enough. She was happy to see Peeta again, but she didn't talk to him. Her emotions were too out of whack. She didn't want him to see her cry, or for her to lash out and take something out on him. For all his strength, he was always as gentle as a little boy.

The sun was setting outside, so the inside of the unlit craft became crowded with shadows. She had a few moments to herself as they set off to whatever Beetee had to show her. She wondered how he got to the courthouse, and how he had hired this aircraft. Maybe it belong to whoever took it by force. Maybe that's the way things would always be.

A heat began in her veins. The temperature was low at first, just a little warm in her arms. But her heart began to pump the hot lead around her body until she began to thought of that bastard Snow and everyone he'd killed. She thought of this country, filled with people who were free but could they run a country? Who was going to bring in the coal? Or fix the buildings when they broke down? Snow had always held all the cards. And now that he was gone, no one had any clue has to proceed. She sure didn't. And even dead his awfulness continues, like a curse over everyone. Of course he had to die. But she wished somehow things didn't have to be like this.

"Where are we going?" she asked, her words tumbling out into the noisy, cold air. She immediately wshed she hadn't said anything. She looked outside and wondered how high up she was. How far she would fall.

"Never mind. It doesn't matter," she said. "Everything has already been ruined. We're going to keep starving, fighting and freezing, and being scared. That's the way it has to be."

"Maybe not," Beetee said. "There's something we need to show you."


	3. Chapter 3 - The Room

**Chapter 3 - The room**

The palace was an quiet white mountain that reached up to the stars. Floodlights built into the floor shot up columns of brightness into the sky. The massive edifice was completely deserted. Hangers-on to the old regime either fled, just the resistance or perhaps were killed - you just didn't know. But the fear of the place - and the newness of the regime changes - still kept people away.

The three of them walked right up the seemingly endless rows of white marble steps towards the main entrance. Two lions adorned the gate. Behind them were barely concealed gun towers, quad cannons trained on nothing at all. Were they really expecting an aircraft raid when they owned all the ships, she wondered? The interior corridors had polished floors and brass lamp fixtures on the walls. The guard station, eatery, and presumably what served as servants quarters were vacant, as if the building had absorbed its inhabitants.

Beetee led both of them down the corridors towards a bank of elevators. Seeming to know what she was thinking, Beetee broke the silence. "The palace has it's own generator, which can run itself in the case of… well… desertion. I think it may run on a combination of primitive fusion and thermal energy. The rest of the country might go dark for a bit, but this place will be running for a while."

They got into an brass elevator with wood panels. The buttons numbers ran in a thick column from 1 to 40, but the buttons also ran sideways with labels like E4 and M17. Katniss guessed this elevator could somehow run sideways. Or maybe the building itself changed based on what you pressed. It was too much - for them to have had all of this. During her time in a holding cell she ate spiders.

Beetee pressed 4, then 1, then 17, then 3 and 8 together. The elevator began descending. For minutes the three of them stood there, as classical music was piped in from some machine Katniss couldn't even imagine. It stopped at a certain point, and a warm, female voice asked for a passcode. "Charlotte," Beetee said with a smile. The elevator continued. Minutes passed as the car dropped further and further down. Their ears popped. New songs came on the radio. Peeta gave her a side hug. "Cheer up. You look even worse than you did during the trial."

After a while, the elevator doors opened. A grey metal walkaway led toward a bank of large machines covered in blinking lights and flat screens. Control panels in a semi circle faced a small raised platform underneath what looked like a giant transparent gun barrel. The place hummed earnestly, and the air smelled like warmed copper.

"Here we are," Beetee said. "We had to do quite a lot of digging - figuratively of course - to put together enough pieces to find this place. And to figure out what this beautiful machine does - well, that's probably the greatest machine of my life."

"It works," he said, his voice was welling with hope and reverence. "It works."

"What is it?" Katniss said, annoyed and not feeling the least bit impressed. "Beetee, I know this must be important to you but… I've had it. I've been through enough that I'd rather just live out the rest of my life with Peeta someplace far, far away from everyone. I'm tired. I've given up, and nothing is going to change that."

She looked her friend, her good friend, and said, "I'd like to go. I really don't want to be here right now."

"Katniss," Beetee said. "I brought you here so you CAN leave." He waved his hand at the thick steel walls, and the miserable world beyond it.

"Not just this building, but all of this. This entire place. Leave, and come back with a way to save all of us. This machine can do that. It can send you someplace with answers, with hope, with goodness. A place far away from the craters and the starvation and the ruin. A place in the past, Katniss. Our past. This machine can send you in the past, and bring you back again. It's a machine of time, Katniss. It can save us all."


	4. Chapter 4 - Analytics

**Chapter 4 - Analytics**

Katniss sat on the floor while Beetee talked for the next three hours. What he said didn't make any sense, but Katniss listened anyway. Listening hadn't been her strong suit during the Hunger Games - she was a doer. Or so she thought. But machines and science were Beetee's life, so she let him "unpack," as people in the Capital were fond of saying. Peeta pulled over a chair and sat in it backwards. His brows were sunken and lay heavily above his eyes. Why did he look so stern all of a sudden?

"President Snow had incredible resources at his disposal," Beetee began. "He had technological research projects running at all times with political, military, economic and sociological goals. But he was also a dictator, and he did what he wanted to as well."

From a transparent table next to him, Beetee took out a red leather-bound book with a gold spine. "SNOW" was written there in large cursive letters.

"We found this in the library upstairs," he said. "Remind me to show you there when you get back."

"Get back from where?" she asked him. But he ignored her and kept talking.

"It's a record of Snow's ancestors. It goes way back. Some of the work is incomplete or spotty. Keeping complete records must have been difficult during the Dark Days." He flipped through the yellow pages. It was filled with hand-drawn maps, tombstones and lots and lots of names and dates.

"But it goes back even further than that. It goes back to a time before the wars and the shortages. He was able to track his family tree back more than 250 years, by our best estimate, to his earliest known relative. A woman named Charlotte Snow. For reasons I am not totally sure of, this machine was built so he could travel back all of those years to that period. Maybe it was a research mission. Maybe he wanted something from there. Or just someone to talk to. But he did it - he built it."

"Unfortunately for him things started to go south with you before he had a chance to really use it. To the best of my knowledge it's been tested on machines and small animals but never people."

"Stop. Just stop." Katniss said. She argued with him that it was impossible. He responded that time wasn't "linear" - whatever that was, and that history was like a coiled snake. You can crawl outside of the snake and walk on it's back and towards the past, he said.

"There are limits, though," Beetee said. "Based on the research they've already done, when you travel back you go to an alternate past. It looks the same as yours, but it's not connected to your timeline. This means you could, in theory, if you start in universe A, you can travel back in time 10 years to universe B, kill yourself and then return to universe A and nothing will have happened."

He stopped to let this sink in.

"So you're essentially a tourist in someone else's past, but never your own. For all intents and purposes, however, it's indistinguishable from the world you left. It may be that Snow was hoping to steal resources from alternative timelines, or bring back war machines to his time. We'll never know."

Katniss didn't know what to make of this, but she sensed she was about to find out something she'd rather not.

"How do I fit into this?" she said.

Beetee held out his hand and led her own to the machine. The transparent tube that reached down from the machine looked like a smooth line of animal intestine. Did things come out of it, or were things sucked up there?

"What you said before is right," Beetee said. "Snow and his regime had total domination over Panem and every fabric of society. After reading some of the books here on military history and geopolitics, there's a very good chance this country is going to splinter soon into civil unrest, and then tribal warfare. There will be battles over food, territory, and power."

"Another dark ages," Peeta said.

"Even if we spent time reading all these books, there's no substitute for experience. And you are a leader Katniss, but there's no one alive right now who knows how to lead this country. Or create a system of government that will keep people safe. There's no one alive today, but..."

"There used to be," Katniss interrupted. "And you want me to go, what, on a mission to the past to bring back a map or something that will fix the world?"

"Yes," Beetee said, regretfully. "That's about it."

Katniss' eyes trained on the floor. She looked at the bottom of her shoe and could see her toes through the holes. She rubbed her nose and looked up at the ceiling. Outside the steel, a million miles above, were clouds.

"Well then," Katniss said. "I'd say we should get started then, shouldn't we?"


	5. Chapter 5 - Backflip

**Chapter 5 - Backflip**

They spent the next few hours preparing. Beetee explained the details:

She was going back 250 years.

She would appear in exactly the same location inside Panem.

No matter what she did, she would be unable to change the future from where she left.

She would would arrive safely - the machine would not be able to send her someplace where there was already solid matter.

The machine would transport just her and what she was carrying. She had to swallow an acorn-sized green metal ball. It wouldn't digest, Beetee said. That would be her ticket home - the machine would lock on it and pull her back to the future after a preset period of time.

"Only a few seconds should elapse for us," Beetee remarked. "But for you, a whole year."

All she was taking back were the clothes on her back, and a backpack containing: a sleeping bag, dried jerky, a filled canteen, a bag of heavy gold dice they had found in Coin's safe, a knife, the custom black bow Beetee had given her, and a quiver containing two dozen arrows with regular, incendiary, armor piercing and rope arrows.

When her hands weren't on it, the bow looked like a thick black pen. When one of her fingers touched it, two limbs instantly sprang out from the ends, and a thin, incredibly resilient fiber melted out of the side to join them. The entire process took place in the fraction of a second - all you saw was a blur, and then a bow. "Hello Katniss" the bow spoke as she picked it up.

She also brought an item Beetee had created from items he'd found around the palace: A hologram projector / data encoder. On one hand it was filled with images of her home and of Peeta that it could project magically into the air somehow. On the other it could take pictures of anything small and then digitize it on an atomic level. So she could take a picture of a penguin and capture every detail of its biology down to the DNA. Or take a picture of a closed book and store a copy of every word contained inside.

Her mission is simple: Learn as much as possible about the past and bring it forward. Records weren't very detailed about what society looked like at that time. Hopefully, she thought, people spoke her language, and there were lots of animals to hunt. If there were people around, and they looked like her, she'd try to blend in. If not, she could run raids at night into the nearest town. It wasn't a great plan, but she'd survived worse.

"Let's go," she said. "I'm tired and maybe traveling in time will wake me up a bit."

Her bravado hung in the air. Both of them knew she was nervous.

"It won't hurt," Peeta said. "All of the info we've gone through said you shouldn't be able to feel anything."

"They only sent back a dog before," she said.

"It was lined with a sophisticated sensor net," Beetee said. "It didn't seem to suffer anything physically."

Katniss started loading up the equipment. The knife was sharp - good. Everything else she had or would need to make. Or take. She was prepared to do quite a lot of taking, if need be.

"What if I fail?" she said. "What if I'm captured? Or tortured? Can you bring me back early?"

Silence. The harsh light of the ceiling lamps drew long shadows on the floor.

"You're there for a year," Beetee said. "No more, no less. If by chance you're captured, you'll stay imprisoned until a year passes. If you die, and the receiver is still with you, it might bring your corpse home. Or it may just come home without you."

Immediately Peeta jumped to his feet and pushed Beetee backward. "You idiot!" he yelled. "Why would you even _say_ anything like that?"

They wrestled on the floor, Peeta pinning him easily and completely dominating him. Katniss smiled. She'd miss them. Badly.

Katniss put a gentle hand on Peeta's rocky shoulder. "Stop it," she said. "I needed to know what I'm getting into. All of it."

They got up clumsily. Peeta's face was red with embarrassment.

"OK, let's go," she said.

She climbed on top of the dais and stood under the long tube. Beetee sat at a long keyboard and began punching buttons and moving his fingers across a touch screen. A soft blue light began to emanate out of the tube, except it didn't move like regular light. It actually moved slowly. It took a few seconds for the haze to descend down to her head. It tickled, like a cool breeze on her skin, even though the room was completely still.

"We're ready," Beetee said. He looked at her, and his eyes hid everything. But his mouth smiled. Peeta waved and blew her a kiss. "See you soon, Katniss. Stay safe."

She raised her head and kept it strong and steady. She clenched her fists and took a breath.

"Do it," she said.

And suddenly she was gone.


	6. Chapter 6 - A New Night

**Chapter 6 - A new night**

Katniss blinked. Her skin was shedding stars. Firefly-type blue lights were drifting from her body in the air, twinkling out of existence after a few seconds. She held her hands up to her face. She was glowing like a neon torch, but the light was already fading.

The sun was in her eyes somehow. From the acrid metal subbasement hundreds of feet underground, she was now standing on dirt surrounded by trees. The scent of pine, wood and rain filled her nose. Forest reached as far as the eye can see.

Katniss hung her pack on a high tree limb, and then started to climb. Her hands pulled her up higher and higher, the ground becoming distant and small. For a moment she felt only joy, the air in her lungs, and the tree bark against her hands. At the top of tree she could see a mountain range rising up a few miles away, some of the tallest she'd ever seen. The tips were snow white and the rock was a bluish gray, like cold iron.

Between two peaks, far away, there was something else. From here it looked like a thumb-sized black rectangle jutting up from the ground. But it was manmade, a building taller than anything else she'd ever seen. A city - it had to be. And in it - everything she needed.

She made her way down to the forest floor. It was probably around five in the afternoon, and she was hungry. The vegetarian was lush and she could hear birds and squirrels. Maybe there was bigger game afoot. She picked up her bow ("What _will_ we be hunting today, Katniss?" it asked her, a bit too delightedly).

She stalked a deer for a mile and hit it with a shaft to the neck. "Terrible shot", she thought. She was definitely out of practice with everything that had been happening. The deer bounded away another few hundred yards, arterial spray covering the rocks and roots with crimson. FInally, it dropped.

Reaching around the arrow shaft, Katniss pulled it free from the beast's neck. She took out her knife and started removing the viscera, putting her shoulder into the downed animal so it flipped and its guts fell out.

A whistle behind her made her jump.

"Not a clean kill, but you're making up for it with yer dressin'."

She cocked her head back slowly. A man covered in green was looking at her. He had broad shoulders, strong boots and something that looked like a rifle over his shoulder. He wore a strange outfit with green, brown and black patches all over it. The colors made him blend into the forest. Smart. He had tanned skin and a brown mustache like she'd seen older men wear. She started to panic, but first looked at his eyes. They seemed kind. But she'd been fooled before.

Katniss stood slowly up, her arm dripping with deer blood and still holding the knife.

The man's eyes darkened a little, but the easy smile remained on his face.

"Whoa there, miss. No need to brandish. I was tracking that buck as well, but you beat me to it. And with no camo or deer piss either, by the smell of it."

This was first contact, and Katniss didn't know whether to be happy or terrified. "What… what language are you speaking?" Katniss said. "Can you understand me?"

"Course I can. Have you been hitting the bottle? Hunting and drinking are fun, mind you, but not very safe. And we're speaking English. You're speaking English."

He took a few steps closer to her, his gun hanging lazily off his shoulder.

"Are you alright miss? Is someone looking for you?"

This man didn't seem like a threat. but she wasn't taking any chances. And he had a gun. He was also standing between her and her pack, which was still hanging from a tree. She needed that. So she closed the gap towards him while scanning her eyes along the ground, and then at the right moment charged at him full speed. He started to bring up the gun, but she reached him first. She body-checked him and knocked him straight backward on his rear. She kept running, grabbed the pack and left the trees swallow her.

The man sat on the ground, his pants getting wet from the puddle he'd fallen into. He saw her coming but she seemed more scared than angry. He didn't know. He'd been knocked on his ass by a blood soaked girl with a knife. But the knife was never in play. She just wanted out of there.

"The fuck?" the man said. There was nothing else to say.


	7. Chapter 7 - A Blip

**Chapter 7 - A blip**

Rachel Nguyen was trying feverishly to get out and get drunk. There was a Particle Physics Meetup in 40 minutes at a bar in the other side of Denver, and there was a very cute girl there who "sorta kinda _maybe"_ was into her. And all there was between her and the drive over was a pile of formulas her professor had dumped on her to check.

Like most PhD students at the University of Denver, Rachel's work station was wherever she could make room for it. So her laptop was perched atop a stack of rejected thesis papers about non-conducting magnetic monopoles, and half-baked zero-point radiation theories.

She texted one of her friends that she was almost out the door, and was standing up when a lazy line on her laptop screen sudden turned into a vicious spike. She brought her face up close to the screen.

Like any good researcher Rachel always tried to immerse herself in data. She had a collection of readouts that were plugged into various open data University research departments. That particular spike came from the Nuclear Engineering Department. She had friends over there, and she knew there were doing studies in background universal radiation. Overlaying the GPS data over a Google Map, Rachel could see something had just dumped a lot of radiation into the middle of the Colorado Rockies.

Rachel's fingers drummed over her phone. There was the right thing, and then the fun thing. At age 27, which meant more? "I guess that beer will have to wait," she said to herself. She took a sip of her Diet Coke and started googling for the point of contact at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.


	8. Chapter 8 - A Second Sight

Chapter 8 - Second Sighting

After after twenty minutes of running, Katniss tripped over a root and tumbled full-force into the dirt. Her body tried to fill with air, but she couldn't seem to get enough.

"What am I doing here?" she kept telling herself over and over again. "I have no idea what I'm doing."

She was… she wasn't even sure where she was. In the past? In another universe? Both? Beetee tried to explain it to her but mostly she just kept nodding. She knew that they needed her, and believed in her, and that was more than she could say, certainly. Suddenly, she remembered Peeta, and started to cry.

"Why the hell did I leave him?" she sobbed to herself. "I'd rather be there with him in misery there here by myself alone."

She was here on what Beetee called a "fact-finding mission." Ridiculous. She was no teacher, no politician. She looked at the bloody knife that she still held in her hand. "All I know how to do is kill." And I here she was, so far from home, with no one at all for her to kill.

Or was there? Snow's antcestor… what was her name?

"Charlotte," she said out loud. It wasn't even a name, the way she said it. Charlotte was a demon, an incantation of pure evil. Even if killing her wouldn't change anything back where she came from, it would still rid this world of that imperial bastard - President Snow. Charlotte, whoever she was, she was going to die.

That thought helped her focus. She caught her breath, and the panic left her. It seemed to be early Fall here, just like at home. It was still warm, so exposure wasn't a problem. That left food and water next on the list. For water, she glanced at the snow capped mountains, and then tried to think of something more reasonable. She didn't have a spile to tap water from the trees like last time. Her canteen was about half-full, and she was thirsty from her running and hunting.

Climbing a few more trees got her a line of sight with the faraway town once more, and there were some small rivers and ponds in between. When night fell, she made her way over to the river and boiled some water in her pot. She fished in the dark, and pulled up two nice sized brown fish. A 30 foot bridge over part of the river served as decent enough shelter. By day she would sleep or try to get her bearings. By night she hunted and moved closer to the city, sleeping in holes, in trees or under anything sturdy. The weather cooperated.

A few days later she was dozing in a drainage pipe during the day. The pipe stuck out of a small hill, and on the other side was a road about forty feet away. That morning, Katniss awoke at the sound of loud barking. The dog didn't sound like a wolf. But it also didn't seem to be playing. It was eager, maybe hunting. The pipe was too thin to take out her bow, so, after determining that the sound was still a bit away, she slipped out of the pipe.

"Now I'm going to touch you, and you better shut up," she told the bow.

When she touched it, it silently unfolded and waited to see what was next. The barking now had a rustling along with it, and a human voice as well.

"Wait. Hold up, Porkchop!" It was a man's voice, light and not overly aggressive.

She had been out on her own for almost a week. If she had to make contact with someone, maybe this was the time. Peeking over the hill, Katniss saw a small man with a black jacket and blue pants running and waving his hands. He was a strange sight out here near the woods. He had blonde hair and an ovalish face that made him look both kind and childish. He seemed well-fed - his thighs were as thick as pumpkins, but he moved relatively quickly anyway. His shoes were grey and didn't appear to be watertight at all. He was bounding after a ridiculously small dog. It wasn't much bigger than a rat, really.

The tiny dog with the red collar darted over to a lone tree about 15 feet away from her. It started barking feverishly up the tree while the man caught up. Katniss was about to look up but something came down first. A large brown blur came diving out of the treetop and scooped up the dog. Large wings flapped, and a huge bird brought a dog-sized meal up to it's nest.

The man dived to the ground when the bird dived in, and looked up from the mud at the treetop. "P-porkchop?" he said. "Did… oh crap. Crap!"

High up in the tree, a large dark bird with a white head and orange beak could be seen tearing at something, while little cheeps could be heard from it's younglings.

He slapped his head with his hand and slowly stood up, incredulous. "Can't believe it. I can't believe this just happened."

The dog was done for, but maybe there was some way to make a nice introduction. Katniss stood up on the small hill and notched an arrow with a cable attached. She pulled back the bow until the string was tight by her lips, and then released. The bird's head cracked to the side, and then fell limp into the nest. She walked out towards the man until she was in a clearing, and then gave the line a good pull. Out of the tree fell a dark, thick bird with a huge wingspan. It looked like a hang glider with feathers had crashed and broken on impact.

Katniss picked it up by the neck and brought it over to the man.

"Sorry about your animal, but he was avenged," she says. She held out the blood-stained mess of feathers as an offering.

The man's eyes bulged out of his head, but not at her. His mouth mirrored the bird's - wide open and breathless.

"What… how... Why…. why did you DO that?" he said, stammering. Beads of sweat were growing on his brow.

"Do what?" she said, totally confused at his full-on reaction.

"Why the hell did you just shoot a freakin' Bald Eagle, for godssakes?"


End file.
